[dspillett]

> > The problem is that a lot of AI contributions are lazily produced without review.

That sounds like a contributor problem. Not an AI problem.

Ish. The tool is not doing the job fully, the contributor is not doing their task properly, checking for that, and fixing the issues.

> I still don't understand a "no AI" policy whose only purpose is to weed out bad PRs. You should be weeding out bad PR's regardless of their source.

Think of it like offering a job, and getting 100s of CVs. You don't have time to review each in detail, so you weed out a chunk of them using superficial cues that have been indicators of issues in the past. They are filtering the other contributions too, the no AI rule is just part initial triage to save a lot of time.

You have missed a key point in what I wrote: "Those that have been properly reviewed for correctness [before being submitted] will be indiscernible from human-only contributions". It is like a Turing test: if you take the effort to make your AI aided contributions good enough to be indiscernible from good human-only contributions then the no-AI filter won't bother you because the people or automations enforcing it won't be able to discern that your contribution was assisted.

> where good code can't be submitted unless the submitter lies.

No. Unless it looks like a good contribution looks.

The problem a lot of projects are facing right now is being inundated by bad PRs from people using AI without the effort to, or likely the knowledge of how to, properly understand and explain & document the change. People have a limited amount of time and if the filter saves a lot of time then maybe losing one or two good contributions due to the filter is worth it - better that than the project stalling under the weight of managing all the PRs.

This is one of the reasons, even pre-AI, some projects declared themselves "open source but not open contribution".

[mexicocitinluez]

Saying you didn't use AI when you did, regardless of the end product, is lying. What definition of the word lie wouldn't cover that?

[dspillett]

If they are simply filtering out based on signs of AI, then there is no lie.

If they are explicitly asking “was AI used” then yes, there is a direct lie involved.

If there is no explicit question but you are including “lies by omission”, then be aware that there are many things people choose not to say that they would be unfairly judged for if they did state (gender details, certain parts of their history, etc) so that might not be a line we want to draw.

I'm not exactly pro-AI, in fact I'm avoiding it in DayJob to the point where I expect at some point I'll be given the choice “get with the program or leave” (I plan to leave at that point, preferably by my own choice though we'll see how heated the discussion gets!), but if there is a at least one human at the end of the process that is properly testing and cleaning everything up so there can be nothing problematic in the AI output that survives, is that really practically any different to a fully human created contribution?

The problem with AI contributions in the vast majority of cases is the lazy ones, especially considering the sheer number of them. Using signs of AI as a code/documentation smell when it comes to filtering contributions is fine, especially if you have up-front requested no such contributions be sent. Permanently blocking people who have sent obviously AI-generated contributions previously despite you asking them not to, is also fine just as blocking people who have sent in entirely human made contributions that break your other requests/rules is. But banning all AI use when if you can't tell if a good contribution did or didn't use AI aid somewhere in the process, is both a daft extreme and actually impossible (if you can't tell, how do you tell?!).